My mother used to say what I used as the title A LOT when we were growing up in reference to the fact that, even though my dad worked as an oil delivery person for the store next door, he would often forget to deliver to his own house until the tank was so dry that he had to clear sludge out of the lines before the furnace would run. She still says it in reference to my own husband, especially when I share with her what I'm about to share with you....
You see, my husband is what they call an HVAC Tech. HVAC stands for "Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning". He's been doing this for 30 years, so he's highly respected at his work site as the "go to" man for any answers to difficult problems that they may be having.
Unfortunately, in our own home, we have a furnace that has seen better days. When we moved in 17 years ago, it was soon discovered that the automatic water feed for the steam heat boiler no longer worked, so when the heat doesn't kick on when expected, it means that there isn't enough water in the boiler for it to work, so it shuts itself off rather than burn out any parts.
The current rate of having to fill the boiler should be about once a day, but it's usually accomplished by yours truly when I, the first one out of bed every day because I was raised in a farm-like situation in which my eyes open between 4 and 5 a.m. and I just can't stay in bed once I'm fully awake, will discover that the house is much colder than it should be. I then have to go out to the bulkhead in the garage - totally unheated and generally cold enough to see one's breath, even sometimes during the summer - or risk life and limb to go down the interior staircase, which has been slowly rotting since well before we bought the house and may well just collapse one of these mornings. Once in the basement, dodging the hanging spiders and spider webs, I make my way to the furnace and slowly add cold water until the level reaches a certain spot in the "sight glass" that indicates how full the water is, usually getting deafened in the process when the furnace hits the point that it has enough water to run and starts itself up...
Many discussions have gone on about this boiler, starting with my husband stating shortly after we first moved in that he would fix the auto-fill before he decided that, even with the proper auto-fill, the furnace (which at that time also provided the hot water for the house) wouldn't be able to keep up. Instead of the auto-fill, we bought a water heater to allow us to shut the furnace off during the summer months, saving heating oil. There has been talk of replacing the old furnace with something newer and more efficient, but we can't just replace the old piece of junk in the basement, because steam heat isn't as efficient as forced hot water heat, which would involve somewhere around 130 hours of work to re-pipe the whole house. There is also an argument about the cost.
In short, the work that he gladly does for other people on weekends to put money into his private savings account for the fishing trips he likes to do all summer can't possibly happen in his own house because it would take away his "free time"....even though the end result would be more money in the family budget at the end of it all because of the savings on the oil we have to use each winter to heat this poorly insulated farmhouse.
And thus, the cobbler's children have no shoes, because the thing that he does every day (and therefore is well paid for) can't possibly happen for free for his own family.....
Which is why, even though all my Christian friends keep telling me that "money is the root of all evil", I keep playing the lottery, praying to win the kind of money that would allow me to either hire someone else to come in to replace the furnace or, if I got REALLY lucky, would allow me to have this house torn down and a better, more efficient building put up with brand new electric wires (as this place has the old fabric-wrapped electric wires from the early days of electricity and may well cause a fire at any time) and the furnace my husband thinks of as the best possible solution for heating the house equally.
If course, if we were still young chickens with healthy bodies, I could take a page from my first novel and go work at a local strip club to earn extra cash for such a venture, but who wants to pay to see an almost 55-year-old woman with belly fat and saggy boobs dance around naked?
*le sigh*
Ah well, at least we have the new cover for the Northern Bard Publications version of "Night of the Tiger" (to be marketed as "Night of the Tiger: The Author's Cut" because we made some corrections to the tale). Hopefully I'll have the PDF of the interior ready for the printer tonight and we can release this one - with the option of doing all three books of The Tiger Series as a special priced set for Christmas 2015.
For those interested in seeing the new cover, here it is, with many thanks to Dee Jae Dow for all her hard work:
Thank you for letting me rant.
Now, for my next trick, I need to find the source of the "rodentia carcass" smell that is permeating my office space because my daughter's cat obviously mauled something enough to kill it, but didn't manage to keep his teeth on it long enough to produce it for us to praise him over it. Considering that the 9 bodies he's managed to show us over the past two months included mice, moles, and even a chipmunk (he's an indoor cat, so how that happens is beyond me), I'm almost scared to find the final resting place for whatever is stinking up the joint, but it has to happen before my nose hairs catch fire....
Laterz.....
Addendum 11/12/15: I think I might be in shock!
After the "freak out" I did on Monday (mostly because the rickety stairwell has started shuffling around when I go down it, which scared me half to death) and letting him see me go back down on Tuesday to refill (at which point he tried to pass off that I hadn't added much water, so I told him he was in charge of Wednesday, while he had a day off and I had to work), he came back from fixing a friend's heat with an automatic water feeder for our furnace!! He put it in this morning before going to work! Apart from going down now and then to check on the amount of oil in the tank, I don't have to go visit the spiders in the cellar any more!!!
Maybe it's just going to be a good day, as I also went into my email to find the message that the new version of "Night of the Tiger" meets the printing tests, so I've ordered the proof copy to make sure it prints to my specs...(and the digital file for the Kindle looks awesome, I must say!)
Thank you if you prayed for a fast resolution to this issue! I'm seriously in shock, and it may take a few days before it sinks in that I won this little battle! *BIG grin as I go off to see what other mischief I can get into with the dog and cat today*
Addendum # 2 - 1/14/16: Thinking of how much my legs love the auto-feeder....
My husband asked me last night if I had noticed anything about the automatic water feeder he put onto the furnace. I've only been downstairs since the original post to check the oil in the oil tank, so I had to admit that I barely looked at the nifty box with the glowing red light...
He told me that the box recorded how many times it's added water since he attached it, and in curiosity, I finally went downstairs just a few moments ago to look....
281
That's how many "add ins" the auto feeder has recorded in just two days over two full months.
281
And he didn't understand why I didn't want to be going down over those rickety stairs, possibly waking the raptor who lives in a dark corner under said stairs and making it opt to collapse the stairs with me on them, in order to enjoy the warmth from the furnace so far this winter.
281....
In 63 days...
Shall I make my hubby something special for dinner on my next day off for saving my legs all those trips?
I suspect I might.....
You see, my husband is what they call an HVAC Tech. HVAC stands for "Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning". He's been doing this for 30 years, so he's highly respected at his work site as the "go to" man for any answers to difficult problems that they may be having.
Unfortunately, in our own home, we have a furnace that has seen better days. When we moved in 17 years ago, it was soon discovered that the automatic water feed for the steam heat boiler no longer worked, so when the heat doesn't kick on when expected, it means that there isn't enough water in the boiler for it to work, so it shuts itself off rather than burn out any parts.
The current rate of having to fill the boiler should be about once a day, but it's usually accomplished by yours truly when I, the first one out of bed every day because I was raised in a farm-like situation in which my eyes open between 4 and 5 a.m. and I just can't stay in bed once I'm fully awake, will discover that the house is much colder than it should be. I then have to go out to the bulkhead in the garage - totally unheated and generally cold enough to see one's breath, even sometimes during the summer - or risk life and limb to go down the interior staircase, which has been slowly rotting since well before we bought the house and may well just collapse one of these mornings. Once in the basement, dodging the hanging spiders and spider webs, I make my way to the furnace and slowly add cold water until the level reaches a certain spot in the "sight glass" that indicates how full the water is, usually getting deafened in the process when the furnace hits the point that it has enough water to run and starts itself up...
Many discussions have gone on about this boiler, starting with my husband stating shortly after we first moved in that he would fix the auto-fill before he decided that, even with the proper auto-fill, the furnace (which at that time also provided the hot water for the house) wouldn't be able to keep up. Instead of the auto-fill, we bought a water heater to allow us to shut the furnace off during the summer months, saving heating oil. There has been talk of replacing the old furnace with something newer and more efficient, but we can't just replace the old piece of junk in the basement, because steam heat isn't as efficient as forced hot water heat, which would involve somewhere around 130 hours of work to re-pipe the whole house. There is also an argument about the cost.
In short, the work that he gladly does for other people on weekends to put money into his private savings account for the fishing trips he likes to do all summer can't possibly happen in his own house because it would take away his "free time"....even though the end result would be more money in the family budget at the end of it all because of the savings on the oil we have to use each winter to heat this poorly insulated farmhouse.
And thus, the cobbler's children have no shoes, because the thing that he does every day (and therefore is well paid for) can't possibly happen for free for his own family.....
Which is why, even though all my Christian friends keep telling me that "money is the root of all evil", I keep playing the lottery, praying to win the kind of money that would allow me to either hire someone else to come in to replace the furnace or, if I got REALLY lucky, would allow me to have this house torn down and a better, more efficient building put up with brand new electric wires (as this place has the old fabric-wrapped electric wires from the early days of electricity and may well cause a fire at any time) and the furnace my husband thinks of as the best possible solution for heating the house equally.
If course, if we were still young chickens with healthy bodies, I could take a page from my first novel and go work at a local strip club to earn extra cash for such a venture, but who wants to pay to see an almost 55-year-old woman with belly fat and saggy boobs dance around naked?
*le sigh*
Ah well, at least we have the new cover for the Northern Bard Publications version of "Night of the Tiger" (to be marketed as "Night of the Tiger: The Author's Cut" because we made some corrections to the tale). Hopefully I'll have the PDF of the interior ready for the printer tonight and we can release this one - with the option of doing all three books of The Tiger Series as a special priced set for Christmas 2015.
For those interested in seeing the new cover, here it is, with many thanks to Dee Jae Dow for all her hard work:
Thank you for letting me rant.
Now, for my next trick, I need to find the source of the "rodentia carcass" smell that is permeating my office space because my daughter's cat obviously mauled something enough to kill it, but didn't manage to keep his teeth on it long enough to produce it for us to praise him over it. Considering that the 9 bodies he's managed to show us over the past two months included mice, moles, and even a chipmunk (he's an indoor cat, so how that happens is beyond me), I'm almost scared to find the final resting place for whatever is stinking up the joint, but it has to happen before my nose hairs catch fire....
Laterz.....
Addendum 11/12/15: I think I might be in shock!
After the "freak out" I did on Monday (mostly because the rickety stairwell has started shuffling around when I go down it, which scared me half to death) and letting him see me go back down on Tuesday to refill (at which point he tried to pass off that I hadn't added much water, so I told him he was in charge of Wednesday, while he had a day off and I had to work), he came back from fixing a friend's heat with an automatic water feeder for our furnace!! He put it in this morning before going to work! Apart from going down now and then to check on the amount of oil in the tank, I don't have to go visit the spiders in the cellar any more!!!
Maybe it's just going to be a good day, as I also went into my email to find the message that the new version of "Night of the Tiger" meets the printing tests, so I've ordered the proof copy to make sure it prints to my specs...(and the digital file for the Kindle looks awesome, I must say!)
Thank you if you prayed for a fast resolution to this issue! I'm seriously in shock, and it may take a few days before it sinks in that I won this little battle! *BIG grin as I go off to see what other mischief I can get into with the dog and cat today*
Addendum # 2 - 1/14/16: Thinking of how much my legs love the auto-feeder....
My husband asked me last night if I had noticed anything about the automatic water feeder he put onto the furnace. I've only been downstairs since the original post to check the oil in the oil tank, so I had to admit that I barely looked at the nifty box with the glowing red light...
He told me that the box recorded how many times it's added water since he attached it, and in curiosity, I finally went downstairs just a few moments ago to look....
281
That's how many "add ins" the auto feeder has recorded in just two days over two full months.
281
And he didn't understand why I didn't want to be going down over those rickety stairs, possibly waking the raptor who lives in a dark corner under said stairs and making it opt to collapse the stairs with me on them, in order to enjoy the warmth from the furnace so far this winter.
281....
In 63 days...
Shall I make my hubby something special for dinner on my next day off for saving my legs all those trips?
I suspect I might.....
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